Smartphones are amazing in a lot of ways, but the sight of the 2GB microSD card was … well, almost ludicrous. I had a flashback to a 360KB 5¼-inch floppy disk, and the big old piece of machinery needed to read it and write to it. There are 32GB microSD cards out there, so we’re looking at an increase of capacity of five orders of magnitude, while the storage medium itself has become smaller by a factor of—what, fifty? sixty? Likewise for the devices needed to move the data around: the analogue of the disk drive in a cell phone is a tiny fraction of its granddaddy in the old IBM XT. Good-bye moving parts (not counting electrons), hello greater reliability and durability to go along with the insane miniaturization. I don’t think you have to be a hayseed to be impressed. (You just need to be over forty, probably.)
